Genesis 2.0

by Collin Piprell

  "Okay."

  Ever since Son has wondered whether this story was nothing but a shuck. Maybe it's only the power of suggestion that causes his finger to ache when a big rain is on its way. Again, though, what it's doing giving him pain at this moment, he can't say.

  knievels

  That dreadful cloud, like the ESSEA Mall mirage except smaller and much closer, glowers in his head rather than out there in the world. At the same time, Son knows it's real.

  He breathes in long through his nose and out through his mouth. Slowly and regularly, focusing on his breathing at the same time he attends to the business of watching. Now he gazes homeward both from this point on Long Lookout and from other points south and southwest of the Bunker. Here's something else new. An anonymous compaction hovers above the spot where the Bunker lies hidden beneath the surface. Denser than the tidal haze of dust beneath it, this cloud is at once darker and colorless, without discernable features. It's somehow related to the cloud of unease he inhabits up here on the ridge and to the sick squirm in his guts.

  He's cutting things fine. The sun hangs low in the sky, and nightfall will soon be upon him. But he isn't ready to go home just yet. He's in no hurry to tell Auntie and Gran‐Gran the news, never mind he believes they must have known something like this was about to happen.

  Besides which, war is breaking out. All along both sides of the no‐man's‐land between Eden and outside, the watchtowers are spawning their troops of large, ill‐formed human simulacra, hundreds of boogoomen. As though engaged in ritual taunting, they surge gently back and forth from either side of the clean bedrock border.

  Auntie says the towers and armies remind her of slime molds. Poppy, for his part, couldn't explain the towers and armies, and wasn't bothered on that account. "Slime molds?" he'd say. "Are they good to eat? No. Are they dangerous? What's the point of talking about slime molds? Jesus Christ."

  Gran‐Gran dismisses the whole business as work of the Devil and there's an end to it. Except when she adds, "And don't you take the name of our Lord in vain when I'm around, my boy."

  Soon, all that remains of the watchtowers are gentle mounds. No‐man's‐land, meanwhile, has erupted in a long strip‐storm of dust. The two boogooman armies clash, legions of lumpy, apelike human simulacra bumping one another, merging till one individual inflates at the expense of a shrinking opponent, the process seesawing back and forth till one boogooman disappears and the other continues on deeper into combat. At this range, though, all is mostly dusty gray chaos. In the farther distance, godbolts are once again blasting away at nothing in particular, fine background to a shitfight fit to make a man stand and cheer. Or so Son feels. He has never seen a day for the watching like this one.

  And it just gets better and better. Because then another law of nature bites the dust.

  •

  Two figures, not part of the armies, appear due north of Son's station on his side of the border. This is unprecedented. Totally unaccountable. They sprint straight into the thick of combat. Too small to be boogoomen, they can't be GameBoys. Even at this distance Son senses too much intelligence and, with one, amazing agility, in the way they move under battle conditions.

  The ken says it's instant death to venture into the no‐man's‐land between Eden and outside. You have to respect the ken, this being one of the habits that has allowed Son and the others to survive as long as they have. It's the most precious thing they possess, aside from each another. Which is all well and good, but the ken can't explain what he's looking at now. Though Son loses sight of the knievels a couple of times in the general melee, he's blown away, finally, to see them reach the other side. They've crossed the border from outside to Eden. Right in the middle of a boogoo war.

  A minute later they come into clearer focus—they've shed their blur mantles. Then they're gone, as suddenly as if the earth swallowed them up.

  If only Poppy could have seen this. Son can tell Auntie and Gran‐Gran about it, though they'll think he has gone gaga.

  homeward bound

  Son hopes he has enough juice to get back to the Bunker; that he hasn't left it too late. He takes a last long look around before getting down to the business of making a safe passage home.

  It's a lovely evening. The western horizon is awash with pastel blues, oranges and red‐yellow, their reflections highlighting patches of woogly sky to the east. This is nothing like the puckling you see over satray strikes but, Son imagines, it must signal a response to something, some event or process beyond the ken.

  He scents the world upwind, second‐guesses the world downwind. He glimpses something to the northeast. A harder look telescopes his prosthetic lenses enough to reveal a fairly stealthy stagger of bio‐blurs wending their way up along the collar of Two Coups Col. There goes the missing quarry. Though closer to the Bunker than he is, they're well north of it and moving farther north as he watches. Probably toward a favorite lair Son has known about for some time. Good riddance to them.

  A fresh splatter of godbolts strikes somewhere north of Eden, but Son remains well within the five‐kilometer safe radius. A distant scream suggests a pig being gutted way over toward Waterhole Number Three. Shoosh. Something emerges from the dust much closer by.

  His leg hurts, and he's suffering dizzy spells again. There's movement on his periphery, yet when he looks everything is still. Then, about three hundred meters to his left, a medium‐sized dune rises, swelling to a dome. It expands and shrinks a couple of times, as though the terrain were panting, which is ridiculous. Anyway, it's almost imperceptible, maybe only a symptom of fever. Now the dune shudders and swells some more. It lies upwind and, even at this range Son hears millions of silver bells sing as layers of dust corrugate and slip down the duneside. He remains in place, gazing songwards, but nothing more happens. Singing dunes are common, though he has never seen an entire dune move before.

  How much of what he's seeing is real and how much is in his head is an open question. He needs to hurry back to the Bunker before he gets any weaker. Unaccountably, he fills with an urgency so dire it threatens panic. He has to get home now. At the same time, the idea of going home fills him with dread.

  It's getting late. The dragons are moving to lower ground even as Son makes his way down the slope, headed home to the Bunker and to his family. What's left of it. All he has in this world.

  He's starving. Despite everything, he can't help wondering what's for dinner. Plus, he needs Auntie's ministrations, physical and mental.

  home alone

  He gets home in time to find pieces of Gran‐Gran scattered outside the entrance. Most of her head, anyway. The other bits he can't be sure of. Some belong to at least one stranger; Gran‐Gran and Auntie didn't go without a fight. Their various pieces are dissed as he watches.

  The forcefield bubble is down. The securiscope protrudes into the open, the shaft to the decontam chamber is gaping. He discovers more parts of Gran‐Gran down inside with what remains of Auntie. The airlocks are ajar, and a ratswarm is creeping in to clean up. How could they let their guard down this way?

  All those times the GameBoys had been dogging Poppy and Son? They probably weren't looking to ambush them; more likely they were aiming to follow them home, hoping to breach the Bunker. Including that pack Son let go this morning. Maybe especially that pack. The stew of pain and guilt that couldn't get any worse gets worse.

  The GameBoys looted what they could, mainly chocolate, brandy, and corned beef. Rats followed by blur dust make short work of Auntie, of whom enough remains that Son can make a positive ID.

  Before the scavengers can get started on what remains of the stock, he sees what he can salvage. The invaders missed Gran‐Gran's stash, which includes two cans of pears and two of corned beef. These are heavy, but they're the last fruit or potted meat of any description he's ever likely to taste, so into his catchbag they go, after he removes the fresh dragon meat. He tears some off with his teeth and chews it raw. It tastes like shit. Never mind. He chokes
it down and tears off some more. He leaves six packs of solid fuel pellets, since there's no way he'll carry a cookstove with him. He also leaves a pot of bacteria paste that survived the earlier scavengers.

  A quick look at the books in the back storeroom reminds him how they're fast decaying, besides which it would be stupid to pack inessentials. Poppy's hardscrabble rules are now the order of the day.

  As he steps back outside into the decontam chamber he tosses the rest of the dragon meat to the fast‐advancing dust. He can always make a new kill. He moves out into the dying light, where the surfaces of dunes to left and right shimmer and begin to advance, roachswarms impatient to take their turn. His leg throbs and he's hot. When he takes a deep breath, it's like someone slipped a knife between his ribs.

  More bad luck. His careful second search confirms it: the GameBoys have the antibiotics. There wasn't much left, but now it's gone. He sucks on the stub of his finger and reflects. He has to accept what has happened here. He bites down on the finger, pretty hard. The pain still isn't enough to counter the ache of guilt and regret. He wonders whether Poppy had time to bite down on his tooth before he hit the bottom of that roachtrap.

  The pain at losing Auntie is too great to contemplate. Gran‐Gran hurts too, though not as keenly. What's surprising, and Son chooses to focus on this, is the sorrow at Poppy's passing. And the guilt. His father is dead, and it was Son's betrayal of Poppy's trust that made this inevitable. The fact that atonement is impossible makes it worse. Same goes for his carelessness regarding the leftover GameBoys.

  Though dark has fallen, it's still hot; and he burns with fever.

  wet work

  He stews in his sorrow till he's reduced to pure rage.

  Part of his fury is directed at himself for screwing around out on the land when he should have been back home protecting Auntie and Gran‐Gran. And he's outraged at Gran‐Gran's god if—as Gran‐Gran promised often enough—he has seen fit to punish Auntie in this way, and Son, for their transgressions. Beyond all that, he craves revenge. Poppy would say that vengeance is a waste of scarce resources. But killing these bastards will mean fewer threats in future; the fewer GameBoys left in this world the better. Best if they're gone altogether, and he's the man to see to that.

  Why he should care now what kind of world the future holds in store remains a question for later.

  He moves as quickly as he's able to in stealth mode. Tracks rarely last more than a few seconds in the blur dust, but he doesn't have to track the killers. He knows of a likely shelter not two kilometers away; he watched before as GameBoys returned that way at dusk. (One more regret—he and Poppy should have gone ahead and mounted their preemptive strike.)

  Meanwhile, the topography between here and there, and the features surrounding the shelter's entrance, are right there in his mental model of the world. He can find it in the dark. The full moon rising will make it easy. And he's nearly sure he'll find his quarry either there or still on their way there. He'll hunt them down, one way or the other, and he'll kill them. And afterwards? He can deal with that issue when the time comes.

  With laser focus, he sets about applying what Poppy taught him so well.

  •

  It hasn't taken the killers long to get at the brandy and, in the end, Son simply homes in on their happy chatter.

  He composes himself, still‐sitting until he spots a sentry perched overlooking a gully on the near‐side ridge of Auntie's Last Stand, a sixty‐meter outcrop. This one is big enough to be an adult, though how it managed to survive so long is anyone's guess. It's parked where it breaks the ridgeline. Restless visual static at the edge of a moonshadow, it shifts in a way that broadcasts "human being," never mind Poppy always said GameBoys weren't real men.

  It seems they've posted just the one guard, which is plain sloppy. A sudden wind whips up the dust. Given his knowledge of the intervening terrain, this provides enough cover to make his job easy. He goes face down in the Boogoo as the gust dies and the dust settles. Soon he's so close he can hear the lookout when it shifts, and he proceeds on his belly, faster when its breathing suggests it's nodding off, stopping when it sounds alert. Soon he catches the scent of chocolate, and then the smacking of lips right through the creature's prosthetic mouth. He covers the last couple of meters in a single lunge and garrotes the sonofabitch with the cord from his catchbag, yanking it so hard he nearly takes its head off, opening the thing up to the blurs.

  Son settles a few meters to one side, shrouded in dust, distanced from the stab of his ribs, the burning pain in his leg. He resumes his reading of the land.

  The far‐side ridge is barren of guards, though moonlight reveals what's probably a monkeyswarm pretending to be part of a ledge just below the crest. Closer, on this side, something else stirs, aroused by a chocolate‐scented dead guard. Whatever it is, it's too late. The carcass has been converted to blur dust. The disassembler nanobots are less predictably voracious these days, but they can still make short work of a bio when they're in the mood.

  Then, as though called forth by the moon, the rest of the GameBoys abandon cover. Son smells brandy, hears the gurgles. They drink and stagger around, merrily oblivious, suicidally stupid. One of them stops to piss in the dust. They take canned pears from their packs. Son closes his eyes and breathes deeply, evenly, listens to the rasp of knives on tin, thinks of Gran‐Gran.

  A perfect stand‐in for the defunct sentinel, he starts making sick‐guard noises, gagging and retching and moaning. Before long, two of the other GameBoys come up to silence him. Imagine their surprise when, cloaked in his mantle, he rises to spit them on his sticks. Impersonating one of the latter two now, staggering and chuckling, he descends to take care of the remaining GameBoy. It's gazing skyward, swigging at what remains in a brandy flask, not even offering some to his supposed buddy, when Son cuts its throat. A coppery tang of blood accents the bouquet of the brandy that spills from the severed esophagus as its mantle begins to slip away.

  Before his kill is dissed, Son salvages a bar of chocolate. There's no sign of the missing antibiotics. Now he's carrying two bags. The others didn't have anything worth the taking, except for the catchbags themselves, one of which is safely rolled up and stashed with the rest of Son's worldly goods.

  He takes a moment to look as the dead GameBoy's mantle abandons it. In death, at least by moonlight, there's a degenerate cast to its features. Beyond the blood and brandy, it doesn't smell of anything. The blur shroud kept him clean.

  Toward the end, blur baths were the only reason that Gran‐Gran and Auntie ever went outside, always with Poppy or Son guarding them. Auntie's natural scent would soon bloom again, however. Its memory tears at him now, and the sorrow wants to be with him again. He hangs his sticks on the strap of his catchbag. They provided too much distance; up close and personal with knife and garrote felt better. But there's no sense in letting bygones put you in harm's way today. He doesn't remember Poppy ever actually saying that, but it is the kind of thing he'd come up with.

  He unwraps the little bar of chocolate and stuffs it whole into his mouth.

  •

  He's going wobbly again. Never mind it's long past nightfall, the muggy air weighs heavy. Snuffles and grunts signal either a pigswarm in the medium distance or his own hungry gut‐rumble. He isn't sure which it is, and this is worrying. He also hears a muted tinkle as of tiny bells beyond number from the dune to the northwest—something has triggered a slide, loosely compacted layers of blur dust slipping against one another downslope at different rates. Son watches hard, but can spot no agent of this event at this distance in the dark. A scan of the entire panorama reveals nothing of note.

  Under the full moon, tidal haze paints a luminous blurfrost across the landscape, moonshadows adding dramatic black accents to dune and ridge. Then these shapes of the land begin to writhe, sinister in their shift toward something other. Son is himself enfolded in a massive yet invisible disturbance, a sequence of fundamental slips and shifts and realignm
ents, part of some emergence. Something terrifyingly alien.

  What was invisible almost emerges full blown. Ever so slightly, the land, its blur mantle, shrugs up. This is more than mere tidal effect. It undulates. Faint music of distant blur‐slips come to Son even as he tells himself he's sick. His wound is infected, that's all. He's feverish and getting worse. He shuts his eyes tight against the weirdness as long as he dares.

  When he reopens them, all is as it should be. An approaching ratswarm, sensing him come alert, changes its mind and slides away.

  It's time to get moving. He needs to get out of here, and he needs medicine. He's way more than a little wobbly, by now. And it isn't paranoia, this sense he's under surveillance. He's on predator radars, that much is always certain. But how many different hunters are onto him right now, and how close are they? His fingers clutch the spearsticks in the dust beside him. He flexes his thigh muscles, checks the wound. It might be just his imagination, but he catches a whiff of rotting meat. If he can't find secure shelter, or at least manage to sit still, he's dead. A dragon, or a swarm or something, will take him.

  And he can take that to the bank, as Poppy used to say, though he doesn't understand what it means. He asked Poppy once. "I know what it means," he said. "I just don't know what it means exactly."

  And that's another good way to get dead quickly—sail away on idle thoughts, let his attention wander. But what the hell. Unless he finds the medicine, he's dead anyway.

  •

  The local dust displays an old‐fashioned appetite, going beyond any dead skin all the way to skull bones and beyond. Soon there's nothing left of the brandy drinker. Dust to dust. Plus a scatter of blur‐proof artifacts. Son leaves them. It's best he travels light.

  That may be the virtual end of the GameBoys. He hopes so. He wishes he'd killed them a day sooner. His family is gone and their killers—all but one—are gone, and he's alone.

  Aside from the knievels he saw enter Eden. These could even be real people, from where he can't imagine. Though probably he's the last real man, maybe soon to be the last man of any kind in the world.